Re: Need whitepapers on BPCL V6.04 on AS/400 -- BPCS-L

Arasu:

I will begin with an assumption that may be in error, but please bear with
me.

You said you were planning to construct a website using Active Server Pages
technology and an Oracle database product. I am guessing that you have some
good reasons for starting with this premise. Perhaps these products are
already in house and you have a measure of skill with them that you would
like to leverage.

I propose that you try a different premise, just to see where it leads:
"What are the best tools we might use to publish BPCS content to the
Internet?"

Have you considered publishing directly from the AS/400? Have you explored
the advantages that this approach can bring to the table?

If you have security concerns that might prohibit exposing your enterprise
machine to the public Internet, you can deploy a dedicated AS/400 web
server and still exploit a wealth of benefits that flow both from the
integrity of the AS/400 and the fact that your applications run on that
same platform.

You can use native-to-native tools to communicate between web applications
and enterprise applications.

Your technical staff can apply a common skill set to address both web and
enterprise programming tasks.

The inherent strengths of the platform such as reliability,
fault-tolerance, robust administrative framework and a rich set of
development and debugging tools are essential to the central objectives of
a commercial web publishing initiative.

The very strong development resources provided by the platform make it more
feasible for you to develop CGI programs rather than depending entirely
upon web development tools. This is a path that leads to full control over
issues that directly influence website performance and the quality of your
implementation.

As a web server, we have found the AS/400 to be very easy to live with. We
are not, however, completely sold on the "magic box" web development tools
in the marketplace. Although these tools make certain tasks accessible to
individuals who lack the training, ability or inclination to write
programs, there is a price to pay for the convenience. We have discovered
that writing CGI programs is not difficult, and the practice has many
benefits.

There are some good books on the subject: We like Bradley Stone's "e-RPG -
Building AS/400 Web Applications with RPG" as a primer.

A useful metric: Our first prototype e-commerce application, publishing the
BPCS forecast to the Internet, took just 17 hours from inception to launch,
including visual composition, CGI programming, configuration of the AS/400
HTTP server and router setup. You could access our client's site from the
Internet, enter a user ID and password, and see the BPCS forecast for your
segment of the company's raw material requirements.

Admittedly, this was a simple task, and the projects we work on these days
are substantially more complicated. Nevertheless, when we started, we knew
practically nothing about the topic. We still think that getting this far
in just 17 hours was a pretty big accomplishment.

If you want to know more, call or message off-line and I will try to help.

Good luck!

Regards,


John G. Dyer, CDP
Vice President
Information Management Consultants, Inc.
812.421.0045 ext. 203
jdyer@imcedi.com